Jenn Diaz “With this proposal, we ask for acknowledgement of the suffering caused to transgender people and offer a formal apology”

On Monday afternoon, the Catalan Parliament approved a resolution proposed by Esquerra to urge the Government to include historical reparation mechanisms for transgender people upon enactment of the Catalan law for the protection of the rights of transgender people.

Esquerra, which received endorsement by a majority in commission, places special emphasis on transwomen who suffered both social and workplace repression and marginalization, leaving them without resources even today.

In the motion for a resolution, which was adopted on Monday by the Committee on Equality and Feminism, Parliament also acknowledges the suffering caused to transgender people through systemic violence and the violation of their rights, and offers a formal apology to the transgender community in writing as a sign of historical and institutional reparation.

Esquerra introduces the proposal in Parliament to make an explicit denunciation of society’s collective amnesia regarding transgender people, with a historical focus on the Franco dictatorship that imposed prison sentences and which has rendered the LGTBI community identities gender uniform until very recently.

Jenn Diaz, a Member of the Catalan Parliament (MCP), said that the fact that “homosexual practices were considered a crime and did not distinguish between gender and sexual identity, made it uniform.” “That means that every time we make the LGTBI community uniform, we set certain people at the margins of the margins of society; uniformity thus meant that transwomen, who are once again the greatest victims in the LGTBI community, were persecuted even more and for longer, until today” she said.

With this draft, Esquerra Republicana’s MCPs espouse the call of the Federació Plataforma Trans—Transgender Platform Federation—to compensate the collective by offering their apology and acknowledgement.